Octavio Paz Quotes

You cannot step into the same river twice.

The world's a scene of changes, and to be constant, in nature were inconstancy.

It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.

There is nothing in this world constant, but inconstancy.

There is nothing constant in this world but inconsistency.

Sometimes you think things are going to be forever, and then... of course, they're not.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear.

Change is the only constant in this unsteady world.

Something that can be so vital at one point can be inconsequential at another. I'm just intrigued by that phenomenon.

Most things don't stay the way they are very long.

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep. We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day. We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep, Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away; It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow, The path of its departure still is free. Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability!

Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state.

Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live.

Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

A course never quite looks the same way twice. The combinations of weather, season, light, feelings and thoughts that you find there are ever-changing.

Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

Stability is not the way of the world.

Everything changes but change.

Without continuity, men would become like flies in summer.

Everything isn't permanent, so don't pretend that it is. Everything's supposed to move and shift.

Life is like this: things come and go.

Can anything be constant in a world which is eternally changing?